Tag: Hot Topic

Walkin’ back to happiness

Last post for a few days. I’m off to Fiordland to “do” the Hollyford Track. I hesitate to say “walk” because jet-boating and planes are involved and real trampers might be tempted to sneer, but I do need real boots and a backpack. It may rain (but the forecast is pretty good). My companions will be a bunch of miscellaneous middle-aged winos (and a winemaker), and eating good food and drinking fine wine will be required. My camera will be ready to snap any moa that might stroll by. If I get back safely, blogging will be resumed on Monday afternoon next week.

[Update 15/12: Three days in a rainforest with no rain, and only one sandfly bite. Two brilliantly sunny days and one cloudy. As I missed out on the full Fiordland experience, I requested a discount. It was refused… 😉 ]

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Welcome to the cheap seats

Hot Topic is pleased to welcome Bryan Walker, a regular columnist on environment issues for the Waikato Times, as its first regular contributor not called Gareth. Over the next few weeks he’ll be posting some of his Waikato Times articles, and as new columns appear in the paper they’ll be posted here (after a short delay). Bryan introduces himself thus:

I’m no scientist – a retired English teacher, and in a distant life before teaching a Methodist minister for some years before changing occupation (not a big change) – but I can cope at the interested layman level. My interest arose because I came to realise three years or so ago that climate change was for real – read Kolbert, Flannery and dismal Lovelock and haven’t been able to detach since – the beckoning serenity of my declining years disappeared – it was probably a mirage anyway.

I’m looking forward to bringing Bryan’s work to HT’s web audience, and I hope his thoughts will spark a lively conversation in the comments. Welcome, Bryan!

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Roll up, sign up, save money

carbonnews.gifThanks to a brief encounter at last weekend’s Amberley A&P Show (I was in truffle mode, manning a table in the PGG Wrightson tent), Hot Topic is pleased to be able to offer registered readers an exclusive $200 saving on a one year subscription to Carbon News – the premium New Zealand-based carbon and climate news and analysis site. Carbon News is especially valuable for anyone working with the ETS and carbon trading, with comprehensive national and international news and trading information. A one year sub is normally $500 + GST, but thanks to the Carbon News team I am now able offer Hot Topic readers a special price of $300 + GST for the first year. I think that’s terrific value for an excellent service.

This special offer goes hand-in-hand with the introduction of registration at Hot Topic. Until now, commenters have been able to leave comments without logging on to the site, but that seems to encourage spammers. Not many spam comments make it onto the site because I use the excellent spam filtering service Akismet, but I have to wade through piles of rubbish every morning in case a real comment has been misidentified. From now on, to leave a comment you’ll have to log in to the blog. Registration is simple and painless, and your confirmation email will include the special code you’ll need to take advantage of the Carbon News offer. Let me know if you have any problems…

Yakety yak

Time for an experiment. Thanks to the diligence of our commenters, the comment count on my post about Rodney Hide’s appalling lapse of judgement on the reality of climate change has rocketed up to over 500. The WordPress blog system isn’t really designed to deal with comment threads that long (though there improvements coming in the next update), and you can’t, as Roger Dewhurst has noted, post images or attachments in-line. I have therefore installed and configured a forum/bulletin board system (phpBB3, for the techies) here. It’s embryonic – I’d like suggestions for forum categories and so on – but the most important thing is to see if it attracts good comment and debate.

Here are the rules:

The Hot Topic forum is intended as a place where climate issues can be discussed freely and without heavy moderation. Using forum software allows many features not (yet) available in Hot Topic’s comment system (including posting pictures and file attachments). Users can create their own topics for discussion, post their own ideas, without waiting for the blog to have a relevant post.

The forum does not replace blog comments – it’s an extension, and a complement. As a rule of thumb, if your comment is directly related to the content of a blog post, post it at the blog, but if it’s off-topic take it to the forum and either join an existing topic, or create a new one.

As with the comment policy at the Hot Topic blog, robust debate is welcomed, but I require all users to be reasonably polite. Anything that might contravene laws of libel will be removed. My decision is final. Consider it a benign dictatorship…

Head on over and give it a try. All feedback gratefully received.

The green green grass of home

Back at my desk briefly (it’s a hectic week), some catching up in progress. The Going West panel session on Saturday morning was fun to do, and well received. There will be a recording available (for download, I hope) and I’ll link to that if/when it’s available. The climate change legal summit in Te Papa was a fascinating couple of days, with excellent speakers. Some of it was fairly dry stuff, as you might expect when considering the legal minutiae of carbon trading, and how the ETS might interact with the RMA process, but there were really useful sessions on dealing with greenwash, checking out the quality of offsets, the pitfalls of carbon trading, and so on. Highlights for me were Judge Shonagh Kenderdine on how climate change is being treated in the Environment Court (with special reference to sea level rise), Karen Price on the process (and contractual pitfalls) of carbon trading, and Professor Martin Manning on climate science and politics. Prof Manning had some interesting thoughts on targets – which luckily for me, reinforced the message I’d given in my morning introduction. There were also interesting and challenging presentations on agriculture and its future from Guy Salmon and Chris Ward (Hort NZ). All good stuff: would be great if it could find a wider audience, because this is where the real debate about climate change is – dealing with it, and moving forward.